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What Propelled Obama to Victory and Sent the Plutocrats and Racists to a Sound Defeat

We hear that every election is the most important election of our lives -- it's a cliché. This year, it may well prove to be true.

November 6, 2012 |

On Tuesday night Barack Obama – who had led Mitt Romney in most Electoral College projections every single day of this race – won the election that he was supposed to. But that win represented so much more than a victory for a moderate Democrat. We hear that every election is the most important election of our lives -- it's a cliché. This year, it may well prove to be true.

The diverse, creative, younger coalition that propelled the first black president – a guy whose middle name is Hussein – to the presidency, beat back what may well have been the last stand of Ronald Reagan's coalition of plutocrats, white working-class men and religious conservatives. The Republican party, with its deep-pocketed donors and extensive network of supportive media and think-tanks remains viable for the immediate future – thanks in part to some dramatic gerrymandering in 2010 – but the demographic head winds it faces will soon be too powerful to overcome. The GOP's most reliable supporters remain white, married couples who identify themselves as Christians, a group that continues its sharp decline in numbers.

Women, especially unmarried women, delivered a sharp blow to those “limited government” conservative men who feel entitled to regulate their reproductive choices and are intent on making them miserable – with waiting periods and vaginal probes and the forced consumption of anti-abortion propaganda – if they make a choice that conflicts with the beliefs of the religious right.

A fifth hard-right justice won't be seated on the Supreme Court for the next four years -- a lost opportunity for the Chamber of Commerce and a potential victory for Roe v Wade, the Voting Rights Act and a slew of other key precedents.

Although it's unlikely that the war is over, the politics of playing on white racial anxiety lost a major battle on Tuesday night as well. The Romney campaign, as my colleague Adele Stan wrote, “pushed the boundaries of 'acceptable racism' to extremes.” The dog-whistles from the conservative media went far beyond, yet it wasn't enough to win it for Romney.

Tens of millions of Americans who were priced out of the insurance market won big on Tuesday. Rather than seeing a concerted effort to strangle “Obamacare” in its cradle, the administration's signature achievement will be fully implemented, and hopefully then built upon and improved in the same way Social Security and Medicare were. Millions of poor people will get tax-funded, single-payer healthcare through an expanded Medicaid program and tens of millions more will come to realize that there are no death panels, but there are subsidies for small businesses to provide insurance for their workers, and more subsidies for middle-class families that have been getting squeezed to death by the growing burden of their heal-care costs. Watch the popularity of Obama's health-care reforms rise over the next four years. That will also be a victory over the right's almost religious belief that “the market” can cure all our ills.

Voters and election protection activists scored a very hard-fought win over those who believe that some Americans have a greater right to vote than others. Efforts to suppress the vote among typically Democratic-leaning groups was flagrant and widespread. But Americans waited in the cold on those 6-hour lines, they got the right ID and jumped through whatever hoops they had to. And the lawyers blocked or blunted many of the worst restrictions on our right to vote. Small-d democracy won on Tuesday. Karl Rove, with his plan to use the concocted specter of voter fraud to gain a structural advantage lost.

A unified America was a winner as well. It's likely that most voters didn't grasp just how reactionary the Romney-Ryan agenda really was. They would have turned vast swaths of our already threadbare social safety-net over to the states to administer, making deep cuts in the process. As a result, people living in “blue” and “red” states would have effectively become citizens of different countries. The poor and working class in those red states would have been eligible for far fewer public benefits. The disparities that now exist in funding education, job training and the like would have become far more pronounced. We would have no longer been citizens of the United States who happen to live in Alabama or Vermont; we would become Alabamians and Vermonters, citizens of states with markedly different philosophies of government.

Gays and lesbians emerged victorious on Tuesday. Not only did the first president to come out in support of marriage equality win – one whose administration has worked tirelessly, often below the radar, to advance LGBT rights – but Wisconsin's Tammy Baldwin will also be seated as the first openly gay senator in the history of the United States. As of this writing, marriage equality passed by a popular vote for the first and second times in history – in Maryland and Maine. A third ballot initiative recognizing marriage equality is ahead in Washington State; a proposed constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage is trailing in Minnesota.

After the running the most opaque and mendacious campaign in memory, “post-truth politics” lost on Tuesday. Never again will a candidate think he or she can promise to reveal his or her plans after the election and hope it will fly with the public.

Fat-cat, right-wing donors spent billions for nothing. As Paul Blumenthal notes, Casino Magnate Sheldon Adelson went 0-5 in campaigns in which he invested over $50 million. As much as $6 billion was spent in an election that returned the same Speaker of the House and Senate Majority Leader, and the same man in the Oval Office.

Reality-based analysis, personified by nerdy number-cruncher Nate Silver, landed a devastating blow to a legion of lazy pundits who make their living relaying what their guts are telling them. Who's got “the MoJo” -- who's winning the soccer mom vote or the waitress vote or white working class men – is now an irrelevance, trivia.

The Tea Party lost again. Two years after they pushed Sharron Angle and Christine O'Donnell to victory in Republican primaries, only to see them beaten by mainstream candidates, history repeated itself. Todd Akin and Richard Mourdock went down in flames, giving the Democrats four senate seats that they should not have.

Now, for progressive America, the fight turns. We can savor a victory over those who would take us back to an earlier time, but only briefly. Now we have to organize, and turn our energy to pressuring the Democrats to fight for our ideals. We now have a progressive coalition in the United States that can win against steep odds. That coalition is ultimately the big winner of the 2012 election.

Joshua Holland is an editor and senior writer at AlterNet. He's the author of The 15 Biggest Lies About the Economy. Drop him an email or follow him on Twitter.

President Obama has won another four years in office. In the wake of destruction left by Hurricane Sandy, the country may have experienced its first election disrupted by global warming. What makes this even more troubling is that the urgent crisis of climate change was never meaningfully discussed in the debates or on the campaign trail. After a year of punishing droughts in our nation’s breadbasket, extreme heat across most of the country, and wildfires that devastated our forests and property, it is now time to turn up the heat on our political leaders. Even with the continued polarization in Washington D.C., there is much President Obama can do to adopt science-based solutions that permanently drive down our carbon emissions and more effectively prepare for the climate-related disasters that will continue to threaten our lives and livelihoods. —Kevin Knobloch, President

From the stimulus through the auto rescue through Obamacare and, finally, Hurricane Sandy, Americans saw the Democratic president making a difference in their lives.

November 6, 2012 |

President Obama’s reelection represents a victory for the Democratic ideal of activist government and a mandate for more of it. From the stimulus through the auto rescue through Obamacare and, finally, Hurricane Sandy, Americans saw the Democratic president making a difference in their lives, and after a campaign that was stunning in its ugliness, they gave Obama a second term and sent Mitt Romney home, wherever that is.

It’s no accident that Obama’s firewall became Ohio, with an assist from Wisconsin and Iowa. These states swung right in 2010 when economic help didn’t come fast enough. But as the auto rescue kicked in and unemployment declined, those voters returned to the Democratic fold. The president did much better with white working-class voters in those states than he did around the country. Union households went overwhelmingly to the president.

Unbelievably, Obama increased both the turnout and his share of the vote among African-Americans. He increased his edge with Asians and Latinos as well. According to exit polls, the white share of the electorate ticked down another point to 73 percent, and Obama’s edge with non-whites, as well as Romney’s failure to run up his margin with them, gave the president the race. Obama knitted together enough of the old New Deal coalition as well as the emerging Democratic coalition of non-whites, women and the college-educated to win decisively.

The improving economy made a huge difference in the Obama victory, with the Democrats’ decision to emphasize women’s issues, especially on the heels of idiotic remarks about rape from Republicans, almost as important. Republicans as well as centrist Democrats still haven’t gotten the extent to which women’s issues are also economic issues. The battle over the contraception mandate brought home the pocketbook benefits of Obamacare, which the president mainly hadn’t managed to sell until that controversy. Making sure that being a woman is no longer a preexisting condition, in Nancy Pelosi’s words, is an economic boon to women, not merely a moral or cultural one.

Paul Ryan was a disastrous V.P. pick, not even giving Romney his home state of Wisconsin. (But Romney can’t really complain; he lost both his home states of Michigan and Massachusetts, as well as his vacation home state of New Hampshire.) Again, he married right-wing anti-women positions on choice and contraception to an equally conservative and unpopular budget plan. It’s hard to sort out the importance of cultural issues vs. economic issues in Ryan’s unpopularity; both mattered a lot.

Big victories for progressives like Elizabeth Warren in Massachusetts and Ohio’s Sherrod Brown bode well for progressive populism in the Senate. Trading Joe Lieberman for Chris Murphy in Connecticut changes the ideological balance as well. Still, the sweetest victories Tuesday night may be the losses of the rape caucus, Todd Akin and Richard Mourdock, along with sexist lout Rep. Joe Walsh in Illinois. Their cruelty will not be missed.

Republicans are already blaming Hurricane Sandy for “stalling” Mitt Romney’s supposed momentum, and New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie for his traitorous embrace of the president. That’s silly, but Sandy mattered nonetheless. Two-thirds of voters in the New York Times exit poll said Obama’s handling of Hurricane Sandy factored into their vote, and they went 70 percent for the president. The response to Hurricane Sandy was one long Obama commercial, a documentary that could be set to Bruce Springsteen’s “We Take Care of Our Own,” but a sincere version, not a sardonic one.

On Fox Bill O’Reilly went predictably nuts, lashing out at Christie but also at the Obama coalition. “The white establishment is now the minority,” O’Reilly said. “And the voters, many of them, feel that the economic system is stacked against them and they want stuff. You are going to see a tremendous Hispanic vote for President Obama. Overwhelming black vote for President Obama. And women will probably break President Obama’s way. People feel that they are entitled to things and which candidate, between the two, is going to give them things?”

“The demographics are changing,” O’Reilly added. “It’s not a traditional America anymore.” He went on to say that a majority of Americans are people who “want stuff. They want things. And who is going to give them things? President Obama. He knows it, and he ran on it.”

The only reason the election was a squeaker was voter suppression in Wisconsin, Ohio, Florida and Pennsylvania. The long lines to vote, especially in minority neighborhoods, represent a 21st century poll tax, and should horrify all Americans. If Democrats were as unethical as Republicans, they’d look for ways to suppress the older white vote. Instead, all of us should look for ways to make it easier for everyone to vote. Democrats don’t have to cheat to win.

The reelection of our first black president may be more remarkable than his first win, given the implacable opposition he faced from Republicans and racists (they aren’t the same thing, even if it seems like it sometimes). In the end, Romney’s contempt for half the country, as revealed in his 47 percent remarks, brought many Americans together behind a man who wants to be the president of all of us. When I saw his tears Monday night, I worried that it meant he’d learned bad news, but maybe he knew he was going to win, after four years of demonization. He tweeted his campaign slogan, “We’re all in this together,” to his followers after his win. Let’s hope some Republicans listen this time.

Joan Walsh is Salon's editor at large. Read more of her work at Salon.